Daniel Lange's blog

There is a add-on technology to X or VNC called NX by an Italian company called NoMachine. It's quite useful as it speeds up working on remote desktops via slow network connections (i.e. DSL pipes) substantially.

The libraries that implement NX are released under GPLv2 by that company. A server wrapping up the libraries' functionality is available as closed source from NoMachine or as a free product (GPLv2 again) by Fabian Franz, called FreeNX.

FreeNX itself is amazing as it is written in BASH (with a few helper functions in C). It's also able to mend some of the shortcomings of the NX architecture. E.g. stock NX requires a technical user called "nx" to able to ssh into the NX server with a public/private keypair. FreeNX can work around that for more secure set-ups.

One issue I bumped into quite regularly with Linux clients and Linux hosts from different distributions/localisations is that the keymaps are not compatible. This usually results in the ALTGr key not usable, so German keyboard users can't enter a pipe ("|"), tilde ("~") or a backslash ("\") character. Also the up and down keys are usually resulting in weird characters being pasted to the shell. Now all of that makes using a shell/terminal prompt quite interesting.

Continue reading "Fixing FreeNX / NoMachine NX keyboard glitches (e.g. ALTGr)"

While ntp may be a great protocol, I find it quite bloated and slow for the simple purpose of just setting a local date and time to a reference clock. I do not need 20ms accuracy on a notebook's clock . Thus I use(d) rdate for a decade now but the public rdate servers are slowly dying out. So I'm replacing it more and more with htpdate which works quite nicely. It's written in C and a perl alternative is available on the author's site. There is also a forked windows version of it available.

Developing a bit larger bash script (which syncs a few servers), I wondered whether I could realize the time sync part in bash as well.

It's quite possible:

Simple, eh?

Continue reading "httpdate - set local date and time from a web server"

Bryan Østergaard (aka kloeri) announced Exherbo today. He assembled a team of (ex-)Gentoo developers including Ciaran McCreesh (ciaranm), Richard Brown (rbrown), Fernando J. Pereda (ferdy) and Alexander Færøy (eroyf) to build a new source based Linux distribution.

They would like to overcome some of the short-commings of Gentoo both from a technical as well as from a community perspective. Obviously this is easily said and hard to really achieve, so time will tell how successful that team can be. Renaming USE-Flags to OPTIONS and merging the platform KEYWORDS (like x86, ~x86) into the Options-logic is no big deal, but getting the thousands of ebuilds^Hpackages better supported and maintained than Gentoo will be the real deal{maker|breaker}.

Paludis, ciaranm's package manager, supports Gentoo ebuilds and can import them into Exherbo, so there is a potential migration path sketched out.*

They also add another init-system re-write ("Genesis") to the pool. An already quite crowded pool with rather shallow water, I may add.

Exherbo has nothing that is end-user-safe at the time of the announcement, so it's safe to assume kloeri's team wants to attract further development capacity .

Browse around the website or join folks in #exherbo if you're interested.

I asked in #exherbo what "exherbo" means ... latin for "uproot" was the answer. How fitting.

Updates

*19.04.08: Two friendly folks wrote in to clarify that Paludis currently can only import Ebuild-builds into Exherbo via importare, i.e. take a Gentoo build result and package it for importing into the Exherbo system through Paludis.
23.05.08: Ciaranm wrote a blog entry how to get build results into Exherbo/Paludis via importare.